A regular reader of this blog recently sent me a question that challenges many bivocational ministers. He wanted to know how he could meet the expectations of his church that he prepare and preach three sermons a week. He is finding it challenging to do this week after week and was not sure how to address it. My response was two-fold.
One, I think it is unrealistic for a church to expect their bivocational pastor to preach three times a week, especially when one or two of those services may have no more than 6-10 people in attendance. Every bivocational minister is faced with the challenge of how to best use his or her time, and having to prepare and deliver three sermons each week is probably not the best way to use that time. Many lay people have no idea how long it takes to prepare a quality sermon. Five to ten hours per sermon is about what I spent in sermon preparation, and some messages took longer than that to develop. That does not include the amount of time and effort spent in planning what sermons to preach. Frankly, with three sermons it could take all the time the bivocational minister might be able to give to the church just to prepare quality messages. When I was a pastor our church had two services on Sunday but no mid-week service. When a few people began to ask for a mid-week service I just refused to add it to our schedule.
But, if a church insists on three services at which the pastor is expected to deliver a message there are some things that can be done to ease that pressure. One of the things I began to do as a pastor was to preach through a book of the Bible or a lengthy section of Scripture during the summer months. Those series usually began after Father's Day and went until I completed the book. One year I spent about six months preaching through the book of Romans. Another year I spent 4-5 months preaching through the Sermon on the Mount. One year I moved the series to Sunday nights and spent the entire year preaching through the book of Revelation. I preached through much of the NT and a couple of books in the OT doing this.
These series accomplishes several things. One, they make sermon planning much easier. You don't have to spend much time deciding what to preach, you just read the next section of the book and develop your message from that. Two, it exposes your congregation to some Scriptures they may not have heard addressed from the pulpit before. Three, it forces the preacher to not avoid the difficult passages that he or she might prefer to avoid. That is a good discipline for all of us who stand behind the pulpit. Fourth, it allows you to take your congregation much deeper into the Scriptures than you can when you feed them a steady diet of topical sermons.
Despite these benefits, I do not recommend that the preacher complete one book and then move to another although some pastors do that. My fear is that people will get bored with such an approach to a preaching schedule like that. I always liked to mix up my preaching so it included lengthy sermon series, shorter sermon series, and stand-alone topical messages. I just felt that kept my preaching fresher and prevented me and our congregation from getting into a rut.
Preaching through books of the Bible does require the pastor to develop a good library of commentaries and Bible study books. Over the years I've amassed a nice selection of such books. Although I have several commentary sets, one of the things I would do is once I determined what book or section I was going to preach from I would purchase several individual commentaries for that book. Logos and other companies also offer excellent study materials that can be used on your computer which can make large libraries available to the pastor at a fraction of the cost of buying books. When I was a much younger pastor with a rather small library I would sometimes go to a nearby college that had a nice section of theology books and commentaries. No one minded me using those free resources, and I was often not the only pastor there preparing my sermons.
One other thing I did occasionally was use videos on Sunday evenings. One that was very popular with our congregation was a series that explored the nation of Israel. Our people enjoyed seeing the sites they had read about in the Bible and learning some of the significant details of the area that was not always available just from reading the Bible. I think there were four or six videos in that series, and that company had more than one series available. Again, I would not do videos every week or even frequently, but using them occasionally gives the preacher a break and exposes the congregation to new information they might not get in a sermon.
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